This is just my two cents and I know i’m just another bozo, but please, don’t friggin use duolingo. Delete that nonsense. It is literally a huge waste of time for trying to learn Japanese. I promise you. You want to learn hiragana and katakana? You can seriously do it in 2-3 weeks. How? It’s free. The link to that website is in the post. It pisses me off when people say they have been learning the easy scripts for 3 months. Bruh, 3 weeks i promise.
by Clean_Phreaq
35 comments
I would argue that duolingo is not that bad at teaching people kana. Yeah, you can just use a boring-ass drill tool (as I did) and be done in a few days or a week, but for a complete newbie using something more stimulating is not such a bad idea.
Only a fraction of people that start learning Japanese will actually stick to it longterm and it doesn’t matter where you get your start.
Edit: Also, I’m pretty sure that duolingo doesn’t spend 3 months on teaching people kana.
tbh you can learn kana in a weekend, there aren’t that many characters
I mean, Duolingo shouldn’t be used long term if your goal is true fluency. But if you have more moderate goals related to being able to speak a little while vacationing it’s not a bad option.
I use it as a way to supplement my other studies such as wanikani since it’s fast and easy to use and reinforces vocab I’ve learned from other sources. Plus it’s free, so no real risk in using it.
I like Duolingo. I would never use it in isolation though. Using it along with other resources like Anki and Wanikani, I can say that I’ve definitely learned things from it. And it was a good starting place, I think. Eases you into learning.
I don’t understand the actual purpose of Duolingo.
Sure it’s not the most efficient. but it can build habits for people to get involved with their target language. I think it’s effective in that regard
Great website!, helps recognizing the symbols faster
I thought this is a post about not using duolingo for anything other than hiragana and katakana….On the contrary duolingo actually helped me memorized them. The gamified repetition learning finally drill those strokes and squiggly lines into my head. I had trouble remembering them prior to using duolingo especially katakana, but since there’s so much repetition in duolingo + plus the fact that it uses a ranking system vs others it gives me motivation to keep doing it until I fully remembered them. So yeah it depends on people, you shouldn’t generalize.
I think it took about a week, not months like you suggested.
I can’t just drop my 459 day streak, the fucking owl will murder my entire bloodline!
I only use it as extra practice tbh
You can learn kanas in one afternoon.
with concerted effort you learn hiragana in 3 days. Katakana in the same amount of time. Write them out, making up little mnemonics to remember the strokes and pronunciation, and keep writing them out. That’s how I learned, that’s how my sister learned. If you have long weekend, youre good. 3 months is insanity
I use duolingo and I learned hiragana + katakana on my first day. Now, 53 days later, I know 200 kanji. And I have a full time job, so I can’t really study 8+ hours like some people here.
Maybe it is a you problem, not a duolingo problem.
not even, you can learn both kana systems in a day each, that’s how I did it. flashcards and rote writing
Looking at the comments, I’m reminded of a meme of Stalin sitting at a desk, writing, with the caption: “Dear diary. Today OP failed again.”
I agree that Duolingo isn’t the be all and end all of learning, but if you struggle to find motivation to keep learning, Duolingo can really help imo. I need to gamerfy my studying, or else I won’t keep doing it. I need those daily challenges, stretch goals and leaderboards to have a reason to come back every day.
Agreed, people can use it to learn hiragana and katakana but I always direct them away from duolingo afterwards. And there’s other apps specifically for learning kana anyway.
If friends want to learn Japanese I set them up with a textbook + starting that textbooks’ vocab as an anki deck. I push them to learn kana within 1-2 weeks if possible. There’s no need to drag it on longer than that. If a college student can do it for points, you can do it for yourself.
Hiragana and Katakana in one day? YouTube Japanese pod 101 hiragana, then do the katakana. Profit
I do what I want!
2-3 weeks is too long, though. It shouldn’t take you more than 5 days if you study seriously, even with Duolingo
As someone else said, Duolingo is fine as part of your learning regimen, but neither it nor any other tool should comprise the whole. I learn grammar using Human Japanese, Anki and random apps to learn kana, Wanikani for kanji, and Hello talk for conversation practice/reading practice. I personally find Duolingo most useful for practicing grammar. I blew through the kana when they introduced it in Duolingo because I had already mastered them using other tools, but it was still a good review. If you’re starting from scratch, you don’t have to wait for Duolingo to introduce a kana before you start learning it or practicing it.
I will say, I understand that Duolingo markets itself as a kind of one-stop shop, but anyone who is serious about learning a language recognizes that’s marketing BS. I will say that Duolingo is much better for Japanese than it used to be. When they first introduced it, it was absolutely terrible.
I’m a real jpdb and renshuu simp these days.
I really don’t get the Duolingo bashing I see on this sub. I get it when the “course” first came out and it was so small it was practically useless. But since then they’ve genuinely improved it to the point I actually suggest it as a decent introduction to the language. The arguments I always see against it is that it doesn’t get you anywhere close to fluency. Will it make you fluent in a year by just doing 20 minutes a day? No of course it won’t, but neither will genki or flashcards. This sub likes to make out that learning Japanese is difficult, but it isn’t. Learning any language isn’t difficult, it’s just time consuming.
IMO the three traps with Duo are as follows:
1. Using it as your sole learning method. At the very least you gotta study some grammar elsewhere. Studying Kanna and Kanji elsewhere is good too.
2. Only doing one lesson a day regularly. ( Like seriously, you will forget stuff faster than you learn it, and it will take over a decade to complete.)
3. Not turning off Romanji / Furigana asap. This is true with any source of practice though. Your brain simply won’t practice reading the stuff you don’t know when there is easy stuff right next to it.
If you avoid those traps, or if you’re just using it for extra practice on top of other primary sources, then it’s fine. I like duo better than endless SRS. Even if SRS is more efficient there’s no point if I can’t stay motivated.
If people are taking 3 months to learn Kanna, IMO they’re likely doing one of the second two points.
Hell no. I use duo and will continue to do so. I’m not looking to learn hiragana or katakana anytime soon. I just need to become conversational.
Stop gatekeeping a language resource simply because you think it’s wasteful.
I use duo when I’m bored. Otherwise I used the Japanese pod to learn the kana and then genki.
Duolingo won’t get you fluent but I find that it helps with some vocabulary and extra kanji. I use it alongside school and feel like it helps. Of course, no one is going to learn a language solely from Duolingo.
I think Duolingo used to be very bad for Japanese but at some point they updated the course and I’m liking it a lot.
Personally I think all the gamification apps like Lingodeer and Duolingo aren’t the worst. The big thing is that you want to find something that motivates you. I had trouble using Genki in the past because my commitment to learning Japanese was low and Genki was too dull for me. Other sources, while not as good, made me more excited to learn.
I am using Duolingo and still pretty new. I am enjoying it for vocabulary and the hiragana lessons are ok but this is a great tool for repetition and memorization at least for me. I think the way this site groups the letters is more logical (ka, ke, ki etc. versus ka, ma, sa etc) Thanks for sharing!
You should have to prove you have at least N3 before giving any advice on here… that would immediately filter all the Duolingo users
I used Duolingo for free and completely learned and retained all hiragana, and I quite enjoyed it. I guess it just varies from person to person
3 weeks is a glacial pace for the kana lol
I learned hiragana from Duolingo in 5 days, then slowly learned katakana from it for a week. After a year of Duolingo I am almost done with N3. I would love that hear your argument for why Duolingo should be avoided but you did not provide any points? Duolingo is good for people like me on a low budget because it is free.
I learned hiragana from Duolingo in 5 days, then slowly learned katakana from it for a week. After a year of Duolingo I am almost done with N3. I would love that hear your argument for why Duolingo should be avoided but you did not provide any points? Duolingo is good for people like me on a low budget because it is free.
Green owl bad
🐑 baa-aa-aa-d 🐑